游戏邦在:
杂志专栏:
gamerboom.com订阅到鲜果订阅到抓虾google reader订阅到有道订阅到QQ邮箱订阅到帮看

应对社交游戏“蒸馏现象”的几大举措

发布时间:2011-07-22 11:44:58 Tags:,,

作者:Brian Poel

一款社交游戏刚推出,所有玩家都处在平等地位,几乎同时体验新鲜内容。然而几个月后,玩家群体就分化成不同群组,呈现不同行为,不同需求。这是反复流失/留存过程的自然结果,但若设计师只关注熟练玩家,就存在忽略新鲜面孔风险。

蒸馏过程

在典型蒸馏过程中,我们加热多相物质,直至其中部分元素蒸发,然后物质开始凝固,混合物分解成两个或多个物质。重复此过程便能萃取更纯浓缩组成元素。

那么如何把此原理应用至社交游戏?不妨把玩家流失/留存循环看作蒸发/凝固过程,随时间流失,游戏群体会分解成系列集中小群组。某些蒸馏过程只关注某合成元素,其他元素都被弃于一旁。若经过几个月的流失和留存过程后,资深设计师只关注熟练玩家,那社交游戏也是如此。但此不均衡状态会影响新玩家的体验活动,他们是未来留存玩家的来源。

其他游戏如何应对此问题

有些游戏(游戏邦注:社交游戏或非社交游戏)已采取相应措施兼顾新玩家和熟练玩家的游戏体验,尽管他们需求不同。

–独立“世界”

《Travian》这类游戏(就像Kabam推出的系列作品,诸如《亚瑟王国》)创造全新“游戏世界”,留有空版图等待玩家入住。这样一来,World 50随玩家群体不断发展的同时,新玩家也另外开辟World 51世界。但这会形成合作挑战,好友们需确保处在同个世界,其初始位置能够让他们进行有效合作。

Travian from ugdb.com

Travian from ugdb.com

–赛季

Fantasy Sports这类游戏模仿的是真正的体育运动,因而也采用了赛季机制。希望之泉出现赛季之初,但会逐渐消失。当有玩家放弃争夺,要促使整个群体保持注意力和活跃性就颇有难度。幸运的是,这个赛季结束后,下个全新赛季又会出现,唯一不变的是炫耀权利。所以虽然其中存有某些无法避免的社交挑战,但自然规律不会让它们成为一个永久问题。

–等级和配对

《光晕 2》问世时,Bungie(游戏邦注:著名电子游戏开发商)推出一个复杂配对系统,避免冒险参与死亡配对的新玩家同熟练游戏粉丝相抗衡,这些资深人士能够轻松击垮游戏新手。进行在线体验几周或几个月后,系统会一直将你同技能水平相当的玩家配对。若你同不同技术水平的玩家一同体验,寻找合适搭档就存在一些风险,但这些问题是特殊情况,而非普遍现象。

举例:《CivWorld》似乎有融入相关技巧。每个游戏回合支持200名玩家,创造不同体验世界。通关体验需花费2周时间,这就是你的“四季”。游戏融入排名和配对元素着实颇令人兴奋。若游戏没有充分利用过往玩家表现,建立不同竞争体验等级,着实有点遗憾。

社交游戏面临的一大挑战是源于新内容层出不穷。参与复杂社交游戏的新玩家很可能需同时面对“新手”内容和适时的“有深度”内容。这里有些技巧能够确保玩家不会因陷入奇怪境地而无法变成熟练留存玩家:

–设置内容等级,这样新玩家才不会因为过多选择而不知所措。

–重复使用请求道具,这样熟练玩家能够通过帮助新玩家获得奖励(游戏邦注:例如他们能够从中获得有价值道具作为回馈,而非在其过去体验的关卡中融入更多内容,是的,人类都有利己本性,都希望攻克关卡,发挥优势)。

–确保季节和节日内容不要涉及其他新玩家还无权享有的功能。

–让熟练玩家能够获取旨在加快新玩家游戏进程的资源。这在主流MMO游戏中被称作“Twinking”,另一较通俗的说法是“带领徒弟”(Mentoring)。在某些社交游戏中,日常特别礼物有区分等级,这对新玩家来说更具价值,例如“欢迎来到社区”这类赠礼。记得向熟练玩家发出此类信息。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Combating the Distillation Effect in Social Games

By Brian Poel

When a social game first launches, all players are on equal footing, experiencing new content at roughly the same time. Months later, however, player populations are fragmented into multiple groups with different behaviors and different needs. While this is a natural result of repeated attrition and retention, a game’s designers risk neglecting their fresh faced new players if they cater only to the highly experienced players.

Distillation

In a typical distillation process, one heterogeneous substance is heated until parts of it evaporate, then it’s allowed to condense, separating the mixture into two or more separate substances. Repeating this process multiple times creates an increasingly purer concentrate of each component material. But hey, I’m no scientist, so if  you’re seriously into self-education, here’s the Wikipedia entry on Distillation.

So how does this apply to social games? Think of player attrition / retention as the evaporation / condensation process — over time it results in a very concentrated style of player. In some distillation processes, only one of the resulting ingredients is important, and the other is thrown away. The same can be said for social games, if a Mature Game’s designers only care about the most Experienced Players still around after months of attrition and retention. But that short changes the experience of New Players, who are the raw material for a future retained player.

How Some Other Games Handle It

Some games, social or otherwise, have developed strategies for protecting the experiences of both the New Player and the Experienced Player, despite their differing needs.

–Separate “Worlds”

Travian style games, like the ones put out by Kabam (Kingdoms of Camelot and the like), create new “worlds” (or servers) with empty maps waiting for players to populate them. This way, while World 50 is progressing along with one population of players, brand new players have a clean slate with World 51. This does create a coordination challenge, however, for friends to make sure that they’re playing together in a specific world and that their starting locations might allow them to cooperate effectively.

–Seasons

Fantasy Sports have seasons, since they’re modeled after real sports after all. Hope springs eternal at the beginning of the season, but towards the end, it can be challenging to keep your entire league focused and active when some players have fallen out of contention. Fortunately, when the season is done, the next season is a clean slate with only the bragging rights to carry over from one year to the next. So while there are some unavoidable social challenges along the way, there’s a natural rhythm that mitigates them from becoming a permanent problem.

–Rankings and Match-Making

When Halo 2 came out, Bungie implemented a very sophisticated match-making system, so that New Players who ventured into live death-matches weren’t put up against seasoned pros who could no-scope headshot them at will (if you don’t know what that means… well, for normal adults who’ve lost their teenage twitch reflexes a long time ago, it seems impossible and godlike). It’s possible that even after weeks or months of online play, that the system could consistently match you up against players who were at or near your level of skill. While there could be some challenges in finding fair matches if you were playing with friends at wildly different skill levels, those problems were the exceptions rather than the rule.

Example: the upcoming CivWorld looks like it will utilize some, maybe all, of these techniques. Each game instance will support 200 players — creating different worlds of play. A playthrough is supposed to take about 2 weeks — so there’s your ‘seasons’. It will be interesting to see if they handle Ranking and Matchmaking at all. The article linked above mentions that some game elements persist from one playthrough to the next (the “throne room”), but that could simply be cosmetic. It would be a shame if they don’t take advantage of past player performance to eventually establish different levels of competitive play.

Putting out the Welcome Mat

One challenge that Social Games run into is a result of the rapid pace of content releases. A New Player joining a highly complex Social Game  is likely to be exposed to an odd mixture of ‘beginner’ content as well as more timely ‘seasonal’ content. Here are a few tips and tricks to make sure that New Players don’t run into weird experiences that might prevent them becoming, some day, a retained and Experienced Player:

–Use Level Gated content so that new players aren’t overwhelmed by choices.

–Re-use some Request Items from one quest to the next, so that  Experienced Players are still rewarded for helping New Players (i.e. they get things in return that are still of use to them, instead of more stuff for a quest they did a long time ago — yes, people are selfish, get over it and use it to your advantage).

–Make sure that seasonal and holiday content doesn’t presume access to other features that a New Player may not have progressed to yet.

–Create opportunities where Experienced Players have access to resources that can accelerate a New Player’s progress. In mainstream MMOs this is called “Twinking” — perhaps a less nerdy term could be “Mentoring”. In some Social Games, special daily gifts are Level Gated, and those could be more valuable to New Players such that they make excellent ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ gifts — just be sure to message this to Experienced Players so they realize it.(Source:plotluckgames


上一篇:

下一篇: